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Young At Art

Kot Reviews Two Deliciously Anticipated Projects

July 07, 1995|By Greg Kot.

New records by the Foo Fighters, led by former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, and Neil Young, in an unbilled collaboration with Pearl Jam, are the types of projects that will attract attention and sales no matter how good they are.

The curiosity is inevitable:

- Young's "Mirror Ball" (Reprise) pairs the most commercially successful new band of the '90s, Pearl Jam, with one of their major influences (if you doubt that for a minute, consider how the riff from Pearl Jam's anthemic "This Is Not for You" mirrors Young's "Mr. Soul").

- Grohl's "Foo Fighters" (Roswell/Capitol) is the first project by a surviving member of the '90s most important rock band since Kurt Cobain's suicide in 1994, and set off one of the year's most fervent major-label bidding wars.

Of the two, "Foo Fighters" is the biggest revelation because Grohl's abilities as a songwriter and musician were so overshadowed by Cobain. After playing with one of Washington, D.C.'s most respected hard-core bands, Scream, Grohl joined Nirvana in 1990 and immediately the trio gelled into greatness after several years of scuffling around the Northwest. Grohl's urgent drumming was the sound of mountains moving and his underrated vocal harmonies were a crucial ingredient in Nirvana's bittersweet mix of pop and punk-metal.

On "Foo Fighters," on which Grohl played all the instruments save for a single guitar part, he builds on the post-punk sound elaborated by the Pixies and perfected by Nirvana: melodies tucked inside noisy, overdriven guitars and pushed along by walloping rhythms. "I'll Stick Around," in particular, is a mini-masterpiece of sophisticated songcraft in the way it manipulates soft-to-harsh textures and seamlessly connects several melodic ideas.

Grohl has a sweeter voice than Cobain, and he rarely pushes it to a scream. This creates a pleasing tension, with Grohl's voice articulating lush melodies atop a prickly bed of drums and guitars. The effect is not unlike dreaming in a bed beneath an open window, with the cacophony of a city street intruding on the symphony of the subconscious.

Grohl's lyrics--fractured, elliptical, almost dyslexic--communicate this sense of sonic limbo, of being simultaneously lulled and assaulted. Occasional bursts of clearly articulated emotion--"I don't owe you anything," "I hate it, I hate it, I hate it," "Get out, get out, get out"--burst through the surface, but most of Grohl's songs are oblique to the point of nonsense. One senses this is by design, a way of preventing Cobain-aholics from reading too much into the songs.

Such guardedness makes the record something less than a complete artistic triumph. But one would be hard-pressed to find a more consistent summer soundtrack.

On "Mirror Ball," Young and Pearl Jam bang out long, rippling guitar jams that recall the spirit of the two acts' previous collaborations: their blistering "Rockin' in the Free World" on the 1993 MTV video awards and a raucous reunion at this year's Hall of Fame induction ceremony in New York. In typical Young bang-it-out fashion, "Mirror Ball" was recorded in four days, bum notes and all.

"No tuning," Young calls out at the outset, and the between-songs banter suggests a spontaneity and energy that is refreshing for such a superstar summit. Pearl Jam--unbilled on the album cover and unmentioned in accompanying Reprise publicity material apparently at the insistence of the band's Epic record label--immediately establishes itself as a distinct entity from Young's longtime backing band, Crazy Horse.

Whereas Crazy Horse excels in heavy, acid-tinged, post-hippie excursions that dip and soar in volume and tempo, Pearl Jam locks into the jackhammer rhythms of drummer Jack Irons and bassist Jeff Ament with unwavering zeal. This gives the epic "I'm the Ocean" the feel of a big wave crashing against the rocks, and it's exhilarating. In contrast, "Downtown" comes off as a scrappy, tongue-in-cheek goof that actually makes Pearl Jam seem like it has a sense of humor.

Yet there's little to suggest that much went on at these sessions beyond a hurried bit of friendly jamming. Even by Young's rather haphazard standards, the lyrics of "Mirror Ball" sound tossed off, with cosmic imagery recycled from past albums.

What might have been interesting is an actual dialogue between the generations, something the record suggests but never quite achieves, with Young's cranky idealism going up against Eddie Vedder's disillusionment. Only on "Peace and Love" does such a dialogue take place, and it's like a car crash: Young's yearning optimism piling into Vedder's bitter epitaph. "I had it all once, I gave it back," sings Vedder, who sounds like a man considerably older than the forever-young Young.

With "Scenery," a song later, Young hunkers down with Pearl Jam for what sounds like a response: a long, ghostly meditation that warns, "When you earn their trust, then you truly are in danger."

It's a tentative step toward what "Mirror Ball" could have been. Too bad the collaborators didn't give it more than four days to grow and possibly flourish. As it is, "Mirror Ball" is loose, likable guitar rock that proves Young and Pearl Jam can find a common groove, and little else.